Monday, May 9, 2016

Retirement, Day #1: Cherry Jam


So it may seem late in the season, but cherries were on sale at Acme this week. So I bought a couple bags because we love cherries. The first thing I made used about 600 grams of washed, stemmed and pitted cherries: Cherry Clafoutis, one of our all time favorite desserts. Thing #2 was Cherry Jam.

Jam is incredibly easy to make. Just weigh your cleaned fruit, add 75% of that weight in sugar, some lemon zest & juice, and boil until it reaches 105° C. That's the easy part.


First you wash, stem, and pit the fruit. In this case cherries. It took me about half an hour to prepare 1.1 kilos of cherries.


Weigh the fruit! The Number One Cause of recipe failure in the United States is the stupid habit of providing measurements by volume instead of weight. To this batch I added 825 grams of sugar. (Jam is not a perfect science.)

It will look way too dry at first. Don't worry. As it warms up the sugar will suck the juice out of the cherries and it will turn into cherry soup.


Now patience comes into play. You want this stuff to come to a boil... But you don't want it to boil over. Time for a new pot...


Cherries are small and annoying to chop. So I waited until they were almost done and hit 'em with my immersion blender. At this point the only thing to do is to skim the froth and watch the temperature until it hits 105° C.

Once it does, it's off the heat and into prepared jars. You can hot pack this kind of jam since it's three quarters sugar. I'm a little paranoid so I used the boiling water process to seal 'em up. We'll probably eat it all long before it's sell by date - 1.1 kilos of cherries produces exactly 2 pints of jam.


Did I mention I'm retired?